Release comercial application's sources as GPL but with restr iction in usage

[Chris Yoo]

I think that accepting contibutions from others is a fundamental aspect of
the dual licensing model - improvements are continuously made by the
community (free, from the original copyright holder's perspective) and are
incorporated into the non-open source version for sale. Provided that
contributions also remain available under the open source licence, it's a
win-win situation for both the contributor and the original copyright
holder.

I am curious as to the nature of the 'joint' copyright assignment, as used
by openoffice (http://www.openoffice.org/contributing/programming.html)? How
does this differ from an outright copyright assignment? Does it allow both
the contributor and the recipient to do as they wish with the contributions,
without the permission of the other party? 

Regards, 
Chris.   


-----Original Message-----
From: David Dillard [mailto:david.dillard at veritas.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, 16 February 2005 7:20 AM
To: 'roddixon at cyberspaces.org'; 'Anderson, Kelly';
license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: RE: Release comercial application's sources as GPL but with restr
iction in usage

> From: Roddixon [mailto:roddixon at cyberspaces.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 2:19 PM
> To: David Dillard; 'Anderson, Kelly'; license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: RE: Release comercial application's sources as GPL but with 
> restr iction in usage
> 
> To be clear, this is true regarding the release of the initial 
> codebase.
> As modifications of the source code are added to the initial codebase, 
> the original copyright holder may find s/he is bound by copyleft in 
> the same way as others unless contributors assign (transfer) copyright 
> interests to the original copyright holder (when applicable).

Assuming that the original copyright holder accepts changes from others,
then yes.  I think the only way to use the dual licensing model as the basis
for a commercial enterprise is for the original copyright holder to NOT
accept contributions from others, thus avoiding the problem you note.


--- David